In the prevailing musical universe, today’s stars are a far cry from the legends of yesteryear. Constantly changing faces and ever younger stars seem to dominate the stage, despite the fact that the biggest stars from the past are still the largest earners. While it might seem that the age of classic artists creates a paradox, the popularity of older musicians, specifically with younger crowds, is actually a predictable trend. It might seem shocking that Michael Jackson, Deadman, Jimmy Hendricks earned more money from their prestigious careers after their death’s than any artist in the present. Although it is argued that classics are simply more relevant due to cultural difference through history such as politics, fashion or major influence events over time. Young people today have so much in common with the young people of the 60’s 70’& 80’s era it’s still a surprise as to why record companies indulge young people with music from the era of their grandparents.
Musical legends have a timeless appeal. In the latest of a series of essays, Leading Notes, our writer Alan Rusbridger reveals why some musicians and singers will always be remembered.
Why is music from the back catalogue of established artists that has appeared and vanished from view so many times before so irresistible to us, and to the next generation?
Well, first of all these artists may be older and wiser than us, but they’ve had an awful lot more time to get their music around the world.
They have suffered and succeeded, loved and lost loved ones, and written the soundtracks to our lives. They are wringing the tears from their keyboards on songs about their memories and our crowds are straining their vocal chords to sing them back to them?
A significant component rendering classical music reasonable to contemporary audiences is the undying relatability of the masterpieces we celebrate today – love, pain, joy, and disappointment do not merely belong in the auditoriums of yesterday, or even today inherent of them.
Classical music has never been a static genre, but has flowed and acclimated in nearly constant continuance with the passions and realities of life. Even the world’s most talented bards did not perfect their craft simply overnight, but over decades, periods spent encapsulating the sorrow and despair of a life, and subsequently the elation, into the compositions we know today.
And it is actually those fervent string of melodies and lyrics that are universally understood as unmistakably universal, which almost ensures that they will never die out of people’s consciousness, as the experiences they present will never fade away and become unrelatable.
There’s another element of experience: No pop artist can avoid the passage of time, and in many cases, as artists grow older, those years bestow them with a knowledge and a perspective that their youthful peers are hard-pressed to match. This depth that time imparts on artists’ work is often the most important quality in what they create. It’s the depth that comes with having lived through epochs, with having raced through youth and then moved at half speed through midlife introspection, with having lived to 70 or 80 or 90 and transformed oneself repeatedly along the way, and with having learned to harness all that life has taught you in a final transformation that makes you matter as a signifier, a legend, a legacy. It’s the depth of lived experience that makes these old cranks the storytellers of our times, who are capable of painting sonic canvases that mirror back the complexities of our lives in resplendent, brutal color.
The Timelessness of Great Musical Performances
Another critical aspect that continues to attract older artists revenue is the simple fact of the high quality of the music they create. For so many, their years of playing an instrument and using their voice have turned them into virtuosos since few can challenge their technical ability. The enduring popularity of their songs is not just the result of nostalgia; it remains because the music is actually fantastic.
Consider the fabled career of wise Australian songstress Kylie Minogue. Her music remains infectious and her allure undeniable. Pop music has been home for her talents from the start, and as she now sings on her latest album, — “I was looking for love when I found you” — she is doing what comes so naturally.
Any suspicion one might have that the years have eroded her gifts is allayed by “Golden” (BMG), her 14th studio album. At 49, Ms. Minogue’s voice has only grown more wondrous, more resonant. She often sings in low murmurs, with the same sort of mettle she brings to the album’s most soaring refrains.
Moreover, longevity in pop music also springs from simply having great songs that can stand the test of time. Time and again, stars such as Madonna, Kylie and David Bowie have proved that classic pop tracks can be given fresh life through reinvention. And ultimately, what this all adds up to is the power of good old fashioned song-writing: You simply can’t be a pop star with all the trimmings if the popin your star doesn’t stand the test of time.
Musical affairs on this particular day were a varied brace, commencing with a lovely display of beauty, technique, and emotion at Senator Lesil McGuire’s Memorial Day picnic featuring Denali Cooks at Kincaid Park in Anchorage, Alaska. At the other end of the spectrum, Darlene Love blasted off at the Adirondack Mountain Club in Lake George, New York.
JENNY HVAL In an era when a couple of clasped hands is shorthand for the Queen Vic’s “EastEnders,” all John Mayer has to do is waggle his neck like a flamingo and the commuter’s gone wild. Give me a goopy bongo or a sloppy scallop, any day.
While serving one another as a tool to achieve an understanding of the collective conscious and sub-conscious, music sometimes draws a line across the human chronology defined by the year of birth. However, in the modern era of music, age is of little significance compared to the significance of music. This is true for both fan-base and musicians themselves. Meaning: Younger generations of fans listen to timeless music as a form of expression, regardless of how old it is or who produced it. Additionally, we are more and more capable of finding young listeners enjoying music which relays a message, and specializes as a relevant form of expression for an entity rather than the twenty or so years for which the musician has breathed.
Carefully watching the lines between the few times during history when music as a medium was the universal form of expression of societal needs and individual awareness, it is evident that many have misunderstood what interleaves the difference between the two seemingly distant points of inception. One might assume the differential lies with the quality of respective samples produced during the epoch and our current period. However, this theory cannot materialize into a sustained argument when compared to the abundance of noise growing like cancer from the root of the radio tower. Music is music, is music. Perhaps, the length between the lines is not plainly visible, or perhaps not even there for some.
Take as an example the reaction of the fans of Kylie Minogue, the singer who had a hit record and was recognized everywhere at age eleven with “Locomotion.” When the BBC Radio 2 program by its music director refused to play her new CD, “Padam Padam,” the fans, as they say, “let him lie in it.” They jammed the switchboard in protest for weeks. Well, this fan-based, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink version of pop does bespeak an important generational change in the way rock music is now consumed; in fact, the way all music will now always be consumed. Young pop fans are going to the place where pop is going, to where all music has now irretrievably gone: where pop is sung, by artists like Ms. Minogue, with huge charisma, vulnerability and a beautifully lyrical approach to sex specifically, but also, in such an obliquely perverse manner that it may have profound implications for the future of love itself, an open five-star song-book to let in love of all kinds.
Crucially, older artists occasionally involve younger artists in their work to give it a new dimension drawing both young and old people to their songs. This fusion combines the experience of the elderly with the futuristic ideas that the young people have in mind to generate a new musical genre, enjoying lovers all over the globe.
The article is about how youth and older artist are working along better than anticipated. It used to be that younger “new artist” wanting to make their mark in music would be less helpful, or less willing to listen, accept input, or learn from the more experienced artist who came before them.
They approached their senior counterparts with a youthful arrogance, not needing any help from them at all. And very often, as a result, they didn’t get the help or the respectful relationships that they needed to become a good professional. Today the tables are turned and the elder statesmen are as often as not spurning the efforts of the new kids on the blocks. They literally are becoming no Old Heads. They have entered music through the artist developmental ladder that onends at the top job. Now they think they know every everything that is worth knowing and that no New Artist could teach them a thing. At Negosentro, we see this a lot. There are an awful lot of artist who don’t seem to understand that they need help or input from others. Songs and writers can be a tremendous source of help even for artist who don’t want to know that. Songwriters can help fine tune a finished song that isn’t quite ready for release. They can probably even help to polish a great song and make it just good enough to be your debut. Even old and experienced artist can derive some new benefits from their young staff or opening act. I don’t know but back in 1994. Blue Boy had its only pop top 40 song with “Remember Me?” Which the band’s lead singer Keith B. Strange wrote. Matt Healy of the English pop rock act The 1975 opens the band’s new song at every show with a brief parody of the Blue Boy hit. It’s a tribute by a Twentysomething to a man who died in 1996 at the age of 42 is among the top 100 songs of all time for whom the audience at a big festival 20 years later probably wasn’t even born yet.
Record companies play a significant role in the music industry by providing a platform to introduce the artist and the music to the public. Younger generations have different musical taste and it is very important for record companies to recognize that primarily their artist benefit from the younger image and the new musical style.
There’s an economic rationale for courting older artists as well: The elasticities of demand and supply work in their favor and in the favor of the companies that invest in them. For any commodity, demand tends to be more elastic — that is, more responsive to changes in price — when the quality of the commodity increases.
Applying this to music, if Taylor Swift were to retire, there might be an initial dip in demand for her songs. But her body of work is fixed, so if her songs have enduring appeal, there is likely to be a point at which whatever she is paid to perform will be less than what she earns from royalties. When artists become middle-aged, and the music that made them famous reaches back to at least a generation and a half, the size of the audience that wants to hear the songs of their youth can make returns to performing large.
Additionally, older artists also have a larger repertoire of pre-existing tracks that can be remastered and remade. This not only benefits the artist, who sometimes gets no royalties from their music, but it incentivizes record companies to reimagine old songs for the new generations of listeners while still allowing producers to keep the themes that made the songs so popular.
Unison – a harmonious intersection of age and music.
As Bradley James Nowell, a late singer and a guitarist of the band Sublime, once said, “Music has a way of finding the big, moving, mythological things in life and making us feel them, touch them.” Music is truly the art that can tie together all races and divergent cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, the format in which music is presented might change over decades, but the fact that the way people interpret music remains constant is due to the fact that music is the universal language. Newer artists continue to put the oldies but goodies rebellious ways to shame, but oldies do not fade. In the symphony of music, one can look at age as if it were the first, even the only, note in a complex composition. Leonard Cohen, a 80 year old composer and singer once debuted by breaking down in front of a crowd full of ladies, who were in their sixties at the least, and they adored him. Young people these days still can have a connection to songs that were heard years before their grandmothers were in labor. It is a connection that is established between the young people and the immensely talented musicians who were there before them. This is not nostalgia music but in fact just the opposite. Young people flock to the oldies to celebrate good music with the melody authoritative artists brought forth for the coming generations.
In a world in which the music industry moves forward like an unstoppable train, while taking on board one famous face after another, representatives of recording companies themselves would do well to understand that the harmony of generations has been, and in all likelihood will continue to be, a lot more satisfying to people’s ears. It is not necessary for the company executives to keep jumping tracks, without regard for the consolidating effect of generations working in harmony. As older artists will always have a special appeal of their own, by working together younger and older artists can help the industry regain strength while extending the breadth of its appeal 渡something families can enjoy together now and in the future. The search for musical excellence is timeless and has no age limit.
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